Brandon L. Garrett

On his book End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice

Cover Interview of October 09, 2017

In a nutshell

End of its Rope explores why the death penalty in America
unexpectedly faded away.

Twenty years ago, death sentencing was at its modern height.
Across the Southern “death belt,” death sentences and executions were common. The
death penalty was popular, as opinion polls showed, and politicians understood
well.

Suddenly, this cycle of punishment began to slow down. The story
of this great decline of death penalties in America teaches important lessons
for all involved in the effort to reduce mass incarceration.

In 2016, just thirty-one people were sentenced to death in
the entire country. If you look back at the mid-1990s, by way of contrast,
several hundred people were sentenced to death in as many as two hundred
counties per year. Executions are fading fast too. Only twenty people were
executed in 2016.

In this book, I explain what changed. I draw on death
penalty trials across the country, from high-profile cases like the Aurora,
Colorado theater shooting trial, to small-town trials in Virginia and North
Carolina that only made local news.

Increasingly, juries are rejecting the death penalty, even
in cases of serious murders. Increasingly, they are hearing mental health
evidence and background evidence that causes them to vote for mercy for
convicted murderers. Those decisions have changed the shape of the American
death penalty and represent a sea change in our attitudes towards criminal
punishment.

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016